Ken Butler
is an artist and musician whose hybrid musical instruments, collage drawings,
performances, and installations explore the interaction and transformation
of common objects, altered images, sounds and silence.
His works have been featured in numerous exhibitions and performances
throughout the USA, Canada, and Europe including The Stedelijk Museum
in Amsterdam and Exit Art, Thread Waxing Space, The Kitchen, The Brooklyn
Museum, Lincoln Center and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
City as well as in South America, Thailand, and Japan. His works have
been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, Smithsonian,
and Sculpture Magazine and have been featured on PBS, CNN, MTV, and NBC,
including a live appearance on The Tonight Show. Awards include fellowships
from the Oregon Arts Commisssion, the New York Foundation for the Arts,
and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ken Butler studied viola as a child and maintained an interest in music
while studying visual arts in France, at Colorado College, and Portland
State University where he completed his MFA in painting in 1977.
He has performed with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, Butch Morris, The Soldier
String Quartet, The Tonight Show Band, and The Master Gnawa musicians
of Morocco. His CD, Voices of Anxious Objects is on Zorns Tzadik
label.

Works by Ken Butler are represented in public and private collections
in Portland, Seattle, Vail, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal, and New York
City including the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of
Art.

Artist
Statement

My hybrid musical instrument sculptures, collage/drawings, performances,
and audio-visual installations explore the interaction and transformation
of objects, sounds, and altered images as function and form collide in
the intersection of art and music. A spirit of re-invention and hyper-utility
attempts to reveal hidden meanings and associations, momentarily creating
a striking and re-animated cultural identity for common objects.
String instruments become body, tool, weapon, toy, symbol, machine, phallus,
creature, sculpture, icon, and voice. Keyboards become cybernetic architecture.
Anxious objects speak in tongues.
Contemporary urban life is a bewildering collage of multiple images, ideas,
sounds, and objects in a constant state of flux as information overload
becomes the touchstone of our age. As we move from the mechanical to the
electrical, this churning mass chews up and spits out material with re-assigned
priorities and updates. The resulting detritus is a living corpse - a
random and chaotic body of juxtaposed and deconstructed items and associations.
From this storehouse of forsaken objects and hardware I, the urban bricoleur,
further dismantle and reassemble the consumer society into functional
assemblages in the form of musical instrument/objects, then coax them
to sing for their supper.
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The
capitals could have been in the chicken runs before they were in the temples,
the marble urns could have been planted with basil before they werre filled
with dead bones. Only this is known for sure: a given number of objects
is shifted within a given space, at times submerged by a quantity of new
objects, at times worn out and not replaced; the rule is to shuffle them
each time, then try to assemble them.
Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities

...profound analogies between humanity, the animal, vegetable, and
mechanical worlds...all the significations of light, sound, noise, and
language....luminously explains the governing laws of life: the necessity
of complication and varying rhythm: a synthesis of speed and transformation...a
perpetual dynamic of thought , an uninterrupted current of images and
sounds, is alone able to express the ephemeral, unstable, and symphonic
universe that is forging itself in us and with us .
Filippo Marinetti
The Variety Theater